How are you feeling?

The following is a guest blog by Ian Wood, Deputy UK Permanent Representative to the OECD and IEA.

In November 2010, UK Prime Minister David Cameron announced that the government was asking the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to devise a new way of measuring well-being: “we’ll start measuring our progress as a country, not just by how our economy is growing, but by how our lives are improving.”  Between April 2011 and March 2012, 165,000 UK adults aged 16 and over answered four ONS questions:

• Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?
• Overall, to what extent do you feel the things you do in your life are worthwhile?
• Overall, how happy did you feel yesterday?
• Overall, how anxious did you feel yesterday?
• On a scale of 0 to 10 (where 0 was “not at all” and 10 was “completely”).

A few days ago, ONS published the experimental results.  Happily – so to speak – three quarters of people rated their overall life satisfaction as 7 or more, and an even higher 80 per cent gave a rating of 7 or more when asked whether they felt the things they did in their lives were ‘worthwhile’.  The mean score for “happy yesterday” was 7.3 out of 10, while the score for “anxious yesterday” was a much lower 3.1 out of 10.

This wasn’t the first survey of its kind internationally.  But the sheer size of the ONS survey does allow for detailed analysis of results – not just by gender, age, ethnic group, relationship status, health, disability, employment status, occupation, but also across geographical locations.  For example, the data showed that:

• Black/African/Carribean Britons had the lowest average ‘life satisfaction’ rating (6.7 out of 10).
• Arabs gave the highest average rating for being “anxious yesterday” (3.7 out of 10)
• Twice as many disabled people as non-disabled people rated their “life satisfaction” as less than 7 out of 10
• More than twice as many unemployed people as employed people rated their “life satisfaction” as below 7
• More than three times as many people who described their health as “very bad” as those who described it as “very good” reported “anxiety yesterday”
• Residents of Eilean Siar, Orkney and Shetland Islands had the highest average rating for both “worthwhile” (8.2) and “happy yesterday” (8.0)
• Other things being equal, respondents in “professional occupations” gave the highest average “life satisfaction”, “worthwhile” and “happy yesterday” ratings

And the results are of more than simply passing or anecdotal interest.  As many commentators have observed, there’s a lot more to life than GDP (important though that is). The new data can help policy-makers target initiatives at the groups or areas with highest needs, and identify which policy measures have the highest impact on subjective wellbeing.  Geographical analyses (made freely available through Open Data and Open Government initiatives) should allow us to make better informed choices about the best places to live.

That’s why the UK is working closely with the OECD on its Better Life Initiative and with other governments to achieve greater harmonisation on wellbeing statistics, and participating in an OECD-Indian Government World Forum on Measuring Progress and Wellbeing in New Delhi this autumn. That’s why we’re supporting the OECD’s project on “New Approaches to Economic Challenges” that aims better to identify complementarities and trade-offs between economic, social and environmental objectives (see Nick Bridge’s earlier post on this). And that’s why we’re supporting ongoing OECD work on inequality and its impact on both individual and collective wellbeing.

Now, that feels very worthwhile to me.